The first Kodak Brownie I bought was a model from the 1930s, a simple black box of cardboard covered in imitation leather, with a metal Art Deco ornament. Perhaps better than any other device, Brownies sum up the qualities of American products I value most. It was simple, cheap, do-it-yourself, mass produced and mass marketed, but individually used and treasured.
I found that first Brownie five years ago at an estate sale for $8, with film still in it.
I had the film developed out of sheer curiosity, and when it returned black I bought more film and took pictures that did come out.
They seemed like childhood glimpses of the imagined future: softly focused and eerie. Our streamlined station wagon suddenly seemed like something out of 2001.
I began to buy more Brownies and soon found one just like the one my parents had, a 1950s Hawkeye, whose finder and lens surge out of the basic box shape with the energy of a `48 Ford. My parents had taken pictures of me with it; I took pictures of my children with the same model.
Introduced in 1900 for $1, the Brownie took average pictures in average light in focus at an average distance-the average pictures of average people. It arrived at a time when infant mortality rates in the United States were falling and more products began to be targeted at children.
Camera for children
The Brownie was a camera for children-”so simple a child can use it,”
as the advertising for it stated. It marked a happy congruence of skillful marketing and noble humanism: The Kodak Brownie evinced a faith in human nature and ability-anyone can take a picture and anyone is worth taking a picture of.
Probably for the first time, a piece of equipment was advertised with a mascot: The spritely Brownies of Palmer Cox`s children`s books preceded the camera. They were the Smurfs of their time, decorating the bottles and ads for Brownie soft drink.
They caught the interest of Kodak`s aptly named Frank Brownell, and the company made a deal with the author. Soon the Brownies in his books used miniature Brownie cameras.
One of the first modern marketing campaigns, shaped by J. Walter Thompson, touted the camera as a device to create ”mementos for the future” and ”after-delights of your holiday.”
Like Mickey Mouse, Charlie Chaplin and the Tin Lizzie, the Brownie became world famous, a kind of character. With the two small circles of its viewfinders and the larger one of the lens, the Brownies of the `30s even wear the tricircular face of a vestigial Mickey.
After I bought the Brownie, I soon realized there was a huge variety of rival box cameras: Agfa Shur Shots, Clicks, Cadets, Spartus Full Vues and Rockets, names as theatrical as the shapes of the cameras themselves.
Changing with the times
Box camera styling has tracked the evolution of 20th Century American design.
It changed from a simple cardboard box (with the same fake leather that covered album covers holding the snapshots it produced) to an Art Deco-style box to a streamlined plastic one.
Kodak added colors and brightwork to the camera`s body in the 1920s, about the time General Motors first sprayed Duco paint on the Chevrolet and applied chrome to the Cadillac.
Kodak hired its first industrial designer, Walter Dorwin Teague, in the early `30s, and in 1934 the Baby Brownie (for which Teague received patent No. 92,830), was introduced, looking like the model for some chain of streamline- moderne shops, with portholes and ribs. Four million were sold.
The Brownie lingered into the `60s, but the Hawkeye was the last great one. Kodak`s sales strategy always has been to make money on film, not on cameras. Thus the Instamatic and its cartridges, which increased film-per-camera sales, and the ill-fated disk cameras.
Today, the film box and the camera have become one, in the form of the disposable.
Brownies are tempting
Brownies kept popping up to tempt me, and I yielded. A blue one in a prop shop on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. A Hawkeye in a junk shop not far from Ernest Tubb`s Record Shop in Nashville.
In a discount electronics shops in Manhattan, dozens tumbled together in a cardboard box like black dice. A Brownie Zero showed up at a consignment shop less than half a mile from home.
I would leave my card at some shops and say, like Sgt. Friday after questioning the witness, ”Call me if any come in, will you?”
I spotted a Brownie Scout model-mid-`50s, mocha colored-that belonged to my neighbors; noting my ill-concealed covetousness, they gave it to me as a birthday present.
I came across shops displaying Brownies as accents and evocations.
”Timeless classic,” reads a sign at the Swatch counter at Macy`s in Manhattan, where there are old Brownies on display. At a New Jersey mall, the Laura Ashley store displays a JEM, a 1940s Brownie clone made in Newark by the J.E. Mergott Co.
Soon I had enough to be in danger of possessing something like a collection of box cameras. But the simplicity and abundance that make them attractive have kept even the oldest Brownies from being highly valued.
They are sold not at Sotheby`s or at shops in SoHo, but at flea markets and generally are priced at $5 to $20. Even camera collectors, including the members of the International Kodak Historical Society, disdain Brownies. Sure, a limited-edition Walter Dorwin Teague Beau Brownie, from the 1930s, in rose, blue or green leather, will sell for around $250, set between Bakelite radios and Fiesta ware in SoHo boutiques.
But for the local camera-store owner, who offers used Hasselblads and Leicas and even Polaroid SX-70s, Brownies are strictly curios.
There are, to be sure, a few fellow Brownie buffs. Victor Landweber, a photographer, said he first was impressed when a grade-school classmate took better color pictures with his Brownie than Landweber`s father did with an expensive Retina.
Box cameras ”evoke a whole other time and innocence about photography,” Landweber said. ”They are about American style.”
Landweber has taken pictures of old box cameras-the Galter Hopalong Cassidy, the Capitol, the Ansco Bear. But even he doesn`t own the cameras but borrows them.
I came to think of the Brownie as an anticollectible: cheap and common and with many types. More than 50 million were made.
Now sold for about $10 each and available in a wondrous variety, Brownies remind me of early standard-issue postage stamps, with varying colors, details and perforations, which are the only other thing I ever really collected.
Commemorative cameras
Like stamps, box cameras come in commemorative editions: for the 1939 World`s Fair, for the Camp Fire Girls. Like stamps, too, specimens can be researched in a catalog-my faithful ”McKeown`s Price Guide to Antique and Classic Cameras”-not for price (hardly relevant), but for identification.
Unlike stamps, however, Brownies can be used again. I had my brother send the old family Brownie Hawkeye to me from North Carolina. With it came memories: of picking at the blistered plastic skin of the used, still warm flashbulb; of the powdery image in the viewfinder, like the fortune teller`s crystal ball depicted in the movies; of the red porthole in the back through which you noted the exposure number (and assured yourself the camera really did have film in it, something impossible with most modern electronic cameras). There was a wonder about being able actually to look inside the camera.
The square, straightforward, unenlarged images that the Brownie produced seem more honest to me than 35 mm photographs.
The scalloped edges of the old prints are like the wavy dissolves that indicate flashbacks of memory in old movies.
Unlike today`s point-and-shoot cameras, with their auto-focus and fast film, Brownies require old-fashioned posing. Photography has been criticized for replacing memories with images.
The art of posing
But I believe that one of the ways snapshots used to create memories was through the act of posing. You not only remembered by looking at the picture; when you saw it you remembered the moment of pausing to pose for the picture- the light, the wind, the mood.
Today, my cameras pose too, on a shelf, sitting together, little black boxes of domesticity, a family, with genetic similarities and variants. And today, my 7-year-old daughter takes pictures with the family Hawkeye.
I watch and listen to the shutter pronounce its two-syllable word of click and recoil: snap-shot, snap-shot.
